Re:United Airlines bans AI agents from booking flights on be...
by swatcoder on Wednesday November 11, 2026 @07:12PM
(#50460975)
> You have a product and I have money why does it have to be more complicated than that?
It's because you've decided you don't want to live a small life with modest local merchants and want to work directly with dispersed national and international firms that have more employees than there are people in your neighborhood and more customers than there are people in your country.
They're running their business on algorithms and trendy business school theories, completely abstracted from you as an individual human being. They're squeezing lemons for the most microscopic drops of juice so that they can show a diagram on a chart pointing in a certain direction on a chart in a quarterly presentation to a pension fund so that their top executives hit a performance target that gets them the biggest bonus and so that their managers catch a bit of the drippings.
AI agents are going to change the details of how that works, but not in your favor because the root problem is sociological not technological. They'll just rework their schemes around agents, perhaps leaning on legislators to make it easier, and still not do what you want when you want.
You've lost all the leverage long ago and AI agents are going to save you.
If you just want to buy a product with some money, and you can still even have the option, go look for a phone number of a human that sells it. For flights, that opportunity's probably just gone forever now. If you want to hope for it not getting worse, using your own political participation to stymie their lobbyists in this time of flux and restructuring might help. But I wouldn't be optimistic.
It's because you've decided you don't want to live a small life with modest local merchants and want to work directly with dispersed national and international firms that have more employees than there are people in your neighborhood and more customers than there are people in your country.
They're running their business on algorithms and trendy business school theories, completely abstracted from you as an individual human being. They're squeezing lemons for the most microscopic drops of juice so that they can show a diagram on a chart pointing in a certain direction on a chart in a quarterly presentation to a pension fund so that their top executives hit a performance target that gets them the biggest bonus and so that their managers catch a bit of the drippings.
AI agents are going to change the details of how that works, but not in your favor because the root problem is sociological not technological. They'll just rework their schemes around agents, perhaps leaning on legislators to make it easier, and still not do what you want when you want.
You've lost all the leverage long ago and AI agents are going to save you.
If you just want to buy a product with some money, and you can still even have the option, go look for a phone number of a human that sells it. For flights, that opportunity's probably just gone forever now. If you want to hope for it not getting worse, using your own political participation to stymie their lobbyists in this time of flux and restructuring might help. But I wouldn't be optimistic.